I agree, Graf, and that's why DRD Team is moving away from Dreamhost's shared hosting. It may be cheap and affordable (certainly for me, but it also is probably convenient for Mike as well), but it's not cost effective to run a site that keeps getting out-of-memory or overzealous rogue process kill errors.
I even tried to increase php's memory allocation but it seems Dreamhost hard-locked it. None of their instructions on how to increase it have worked.